Metroland, 100 years on: what's become of England’s original vision of suburbia?

In 1915, the Metropolitan Railway coined the term Metroland to describe a band of countryside just north-west of London, marketed as a land of idyllic cottages and wild flowers. But amid claims of overcrowding and a sea of ubiquitous semis, how does Metroland’s 21st-century reality compare with the original dream?

Planners, architects and builders are not the only ones who create cities. The suburban landscape of north-west London owes its existence, largely, to the imagination of the Metropolitan Railway’s marketing department.

One hundred years ago, in the summer of 1915, the railway’s publicity people devised the term “Metroland” to describe the catchment area of villages stretching from Neasden into the Chiltern Hills. The railway had bought up huge tracts of farmland along this corridor in the decades before the first world war, and it was ripe for development. All they needed was a sales pitch.

The first Metroland booklets were filled with illustrations of idyllic cottages and dainty verses about “a land where the wild flowers grow”. A semi-rural arcadia was offered to Londoners sick of crowded conditions in the city. The campaign proved a roaring success. After the war, the white-collar workers who sought space and greenery flocked to the north-west of the city.

Over the next 20 years, the railway’s development company and its building partners unrolled commuter estates from Neasden out into Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire. Fields were filled with endless avenues of mock-Tudor “country” villas: semi-detached dwellings with steep roofs, bay windows and half-timbered gables. The Metropolitan’s PR people had accidentally invented English suburbia.

John Betjeman described Neasden as 'the home of the gnome and the ordinary citizen'

Metroland today is very different to the vision once conjured up by the railway’s brochures and posters. Open countryside has long since been engulfed by the ubiquitous semis, and there is now no obvious delineation between the old village centres. In recent years, there has been a steady drip of stories about overcrowding, slum landlords and “beds in sheds” . The noisy high streets of Brent and Harrow now look indistinguishable from much of inner London.

To mark the 100th anniversary of the Met’s great marketing drive, I wanted to discover what has become of London’s quintessential suburbs. Is there is anything left of the railway’s promise of an escape from the city – the original vision of happy commuters living in harmony with nature?

When John Betjeman made his famous journey through the area for his 1973 BBC documentary Metro-Land, the poet found a residential community of quiet contentment, a citadel of home-ownership and hedge trimming – golf clubs, garden fetes and ladies who lunch.

My own journey through 21st-century Metroland begins in Neasden, the original staging post for the Metropolitan line’s expansion, the place Betjeman described as “the home of the gnome and the ordinary citizen”. Life along the thoroughfare of Neasden Lane is now default low-income London: chicken shops, nail bars and bookmakers. Most of the window adverts for accommodation are in Polish, with bedsit rooms offered at £90 a week (I dread to think what £90 a week gets you in any part of London).

There are signs that some of Neasden’s longer-standing gnome-owners are not overjoyed with all the daytime street-drinkers here. The council was recently forced to clear graffiti from the underpass reading: “Beggars not welcome! Keep Neasden nice! Keep Neasden beggar-free!”

Metroland describes the area of villages stretching from Neasden into the Chiltern Hills. Photograph: Alamy

London’s demographics have shifted considerably since Betjeman’s film. Population pressures, soaring house prices and gentrification continue to change long-standing patterns of behaviour. For one thing, the desirability of inner-city areas such as Brixton, Hackney and Peckham has halted the traditional flight of young parents into the suburbs.

Estate agent Savills has produced a fascinating map showing how London’s inner boroughs have climbed in socio-economic status in recent years, becoming upmarket red, while the outer suburbs of Neasden, Wembley and Harrow have been turning downmarket blue (the assessments are based on detailed Office for National Statistics data about occupation). The Economist has dubbed the trend “the great inversion”.

“Gentrification is real – the wealthier population now want to stay close to job hotspots in the city centre,” explains Neal Hudson, one of Savills’ research directors. “And there has been an increase in less affluent people moving out to areas such as north-west London. Suburban housing stock is more flexible than in the centre – it’s easier to get more people into four bedroom, semi-detached houses than into a two-bedroom flat. The suburbs are the unsung hero of the housing market in absorbing demand.”

If the suburbs are absorbing those priced-out of central London’s more fashionable districts, what impact is the great inversion having on housing in Metroland? As with many ‘burb-bashing intellectuals since, pre-war architectural critic Osbert Lancaster found London’s new suburban districts dreary and sterile. Back in 1938, he predicted they would “inevitably become the slums of the future”. Could his once unlikely prediction now be on the verge of coming true?

In Harrow, unofficial capital of Metroland, the winding crescents are mostly quiet and gardens still well-kept. But in the gaps between the semis, it’s not difficult to spot jerry-built brick buildings at the bottom of gardens. The borough has attracted a lot of attention for its “beds in sheds” problem. Last year, Conservative councillor Susan Hall, then leader of Harrow Council, ordered a thermal imaging plane to fly over the streets and create a heat map of “unexpected hotspots” (319 occupied outbuildings were discovered).

If the suburbs are absorbing those priced-out of central London, what impact is the great inversion having on Metroland?

The suburbs of Neasden, Wembley and Harrow have been declining in recent years. Photograph: Adam Forrest

Although she is no longer in charge, Hall is still anxious about overcrowding “rippling out” from central London into Metroland. “It’s dreadful,” she says. “I’ve seen five or six people living in one room. I’ve seen some rooms that are complete slums. People are being exploited by landlords. And it’s not fair to the neighbours. It’s wrong on every level.”

“I didn’t ever expect to see overcrowding in Harrow,” she adds. “My mother came here to marry my father, and her family, from east London, thought she had really gone up in the world. Harrow has always been lovely, but certain parts of it are going downhill.”

Hall is careful not to mention immigration, having already taken flak for tying multiple occupancy problems to “recent waves of new arrivals from eastern Europe”. Other councillors and resident groups in the Metroland suburbs of Kingsbury and Queensbury have complained about coaches full of migrants arriving in the area directly from Romania.

A 1930s sign advertising the building of the Grange Park Estate in Uxbridge. Photograph: Alamy

Such concerns are not new. Kanti Nagda is one of the elders of Harrow’s large Hindu Gujarati community, and he runs a legal advice service near Harrow town centre. He came here in 1972, part of the exodus of Hindus expelled from Idi Amin’s Uganda. He remembers early problems with some Harrow councillors who “discouraged” them from staying by saying the meals-on-wheels system could not cope with newcomers.

“To prosper, we wanted to go into leafy areas with good schools, good houses and space,” he recalls. “So Harrow was attractive to us. The Gujarati community from east Africa was largely well-to-do, so, after some initial difficulties, it was relatively easy for us to integrate here. By the mid-1970s, you saw the Gujarati community buying houses, getting windows doubled glazed and so on. We wanted to establish ourselves here.”

Nagda is worried about today’s housing shortage and pressure on school places. “We are seeing lots of new people moving here. They want to make a life, they want to raise children. Harrow has lots of parks and good schools. And so the pattern continues. You cannot blame people: you have to blame politicians for not planning properly for numbers.”

At Harrow Council, Glen Hearnden, the portfolio holder for housing, explains a strategy to bring 5,500 new homes to the borough: a broad mix of private rentals, homes for sale and social housing. “Metroland really came about because of a lack of housing after the war, and we’re looking at a situation again where there’s a huge demand for more houses,” he says. “It’s sort of Metroland 2.”

It looks like Metroland 2 will resemble other parts of inner, residential London. As with Wembley, Harrow has seen boxy apartment blocks go up to accommodate a shift in tenure type. The latest census shows private renting in the area has risen from 13% to 20%. Harrow is now the third-most searched London borough among renters (average rent here is £1,269 per month, still slightly below the London average of £1,500) as more people get priced out of the city centre.

A development of private flats by The Hyde Group, which reaches 20 storeys at its highest point, has recently been approved on the town centre site of an old post office building. Councillor Hearnden doesn’t think Harrow has yet reached “saturation point” for three- or four-bedroom homes with gardens. But most new housing will have to happen in brownfield sites where “a mix of family accommodation” will be balanced with “the need to go high-density in certain areas”.

Further up the Metropolitan line in Chorleywood, out in leafy Hertfordshire, the tidy balance of town and country has been preserved. This is a wealthy community. It’s difficult to find a four-bedroom home here for anything less than £750,000. Shop windows advertise trombone lessons, yard space for ponies and wasp removal services (“use a local man”).

Ironically, the old Metroland dream of semi-rural living exists here mainly because of the green belt – the ring of protected countryside around London designed to curtail urban sprawl. The green belt’s planning restrictions have preserved the outer reaches of Metroland – places such as Chorleywood – ever since the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act. But members of the Chorleywood Residents Association (CRA) remain concerned about “infilling”, as developers buy up old bungalows, demolish them, and build two large detached homes on the same plot of land. Henry Goldberg, chair of the CRA, says “there is a constant watch needed on development”.

Suburban housing estates seen from the air in Queensbury, north-west London in 1935. Photograph: RH Windsor/Getty

Goldberg and his wife moved out here from Harrow at the end of the 1960s. “The environment we have doesn’t cause the stresses you have in cities,” says the retiree. “That’s why people live here. So there would be a concern if there was too big an increase in the density of housing.”

During Metroland’s interwar heyday, speculative builders such as ES Reid, TF Nash and F&C Costin had no constraints to worry about. The sheer volume of homes they built is impressive, a reminder of what can be achieved by mass house-building, freed of the planning system. In the early 1930s, these firms were creating 1,000 semi-detached homes a year, across a single estate around Harrow’s Northwick Park station. Little wonder the building boom of the 30s produced more than 500,000 homes in the capital, almost entirely in outer London.

To a generation of architects absorbed by the idea of engineering communal living in tower blocks and forging streets in the sky, the low-density suburbs appeared unstructured and wasteful, a place of aimless, endless sprawl. But it is worth trying to understand why Metroland – in the absence of a masterplan – has survived a century, long after many of inner London’s utopian experiments in place-making – schemes such as the Heygate Estate and Robin Hood Gardens – have been earmarked for demolition.

Laura Vaughan, professor of urban form and society at University College, London, thinks urbanists and intellectuals have underestimated the care taken by Metroland’s interwar building firms. “Although housebuilding happened at low density, there was coherence to the layout,” she says. “The perception of sprawl isn’t entirely fair, because [builders] worked well with road networks, with pre-existing village centres of shops and pubs, with a lot of commons and woodlands retained. There’s a reason the suburbs were popular.”

Everyone is looking for something more comfortable, a place to settle down, a garden for the kids

Marius Zarnescu, his wife Laura and three-month old daughter have moved out to Slough, where housing is more affordable. Photograph: Adam Forrest

There is also the persistent, ongoing popularity of traditional housebuilding in the English vernacular. In his classic work The Castles on the Ground, architectural historian JM Richards tried to figure out the attraction of the conservative, cottage-aping suburban style, and “the appeal it holds for 90 out of 100”. It seems these dwellings tap into a strong desire for space and privacy. And space and privacy retain their allure today.

Back in the Metroland suburb of Kingsbury, newcomers are assessing their options. Marius Zarnescu, 28, is a crane operator and the pastor of Kingsbury’s Victory Romanian Baptist Church. His congregation is mostly made up of young couples in their 20s and 30s, and Zarnescu says many are moving from Kingsbury to towns outside of London – places such as Uxbridge, Watford, Slough and Reading – in search of more spacious and affordable accommodation.

He and his wife Laura used to share a house in Kingsbury with another couple. Now that they have a three-month-old daughter, they have moved to Slough, where they can afford to rent a house of their own. “The families at the church are trying to make a life in England,” he says. “Everyone is looking for something more comfortable, a place to settle down, a garden for the kids. And if they have to go outside of London to do it, then it’s for the best.”

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One hundred years on, Metroland is still providing a starting point for many young families. Ironically, families such as the Zarnescus are choosing to then move out of London altogether, skipping over the green belt in search of a more affordable version of the suburban ideal.

For many people who would like to do the same, the high cost of commuting into London and the unreliability of public transport generally – especially the railway system that once inspired the creation of Metroland – remains the big barrier to fleeing cramped, over-expensive housing in central London.

Yet suburbia’s ongoing appeal – space, greenery and privacy – remains a telling reminder of what people actually want, not what planners think they should want. It has become fashionable in recent years to wish away London’s housing shortage by talking about the availability of brownfield sites, to imagine an urban renaissance of “sustainable” and “compact” living. But blocks of tiny flats on brownfield sites cannot satisfy everyone, and won’t get anywhere near meeting pent-up demand across the capital.

Perhaps, then, it is time for London’s boundaries to grow again – to embrace development on the stifling green belt, and let a new generation enjoy the dream of living near, yet far, from the city.